Re: cleaning without -f

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 12:34:10AM -0600, Robert Boehne wrote:
> Adding "-f" only supresses the error message, and mode=clean requires
> you to give it the "rm" program so why not use
> --mode=clean 'rm -f' 
> Or does that not work?

I think you misunderstood the issue.

The issue is that:

        libtool --mode=clean rm exe
        (where exe is a shell wrapper script for a linked executable)

fails EVEN WHEN exe exists!

The semantics people expect from 'rm' are:
        rm exe <-- succeeds if file exists
        rm -f exe <-- always succeeds

presently libtool's semantics are:
        rm exe <-- always fails
        rm -f exe <-- always succeeds

This discrepency is bad.

---
Wes